Over the past several years, we’ve seen a proliferation of successful men’s e-commerce brands in a wide variety of categories. In grooming, there’s Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s. In clothing, Bonobos and Trunkclub. More recently, we’ve seen athletic wear enter the mix with brands like Rhone gaining traction.

Men's e-commerce is under-penetrated

Despite all of this growth, we still think that men’s e-commerce is relatively under-penetrated compared to women’s e-commerce. Let’s take a look at athletic wear as an example. Our post from a few weeks ago on athleisure cited half a dozen new womenswear brands in the category. In menswear, we were hardpressed to think of more than a couple. Going into this post, our hypothesis was that not only are men underserved relative to women, but that on top of that, they’re actually better e-commerce consumers than women are.

To test this hypothesis, we ran a survey seeking responses from Millennial men and women on their e-commerce buying behavior. We got over 80 responses and the results were quite dramatic.

Men are better e-commerce consumers than women

The story they tell us in favor of targeting men over women goes something like this. When men shop, they typically shop online more than women (80% vs. 64%). What’s more, when they do turn to online shopping, almost 90% of them are looking for something specific. Women, on the other hand, are are just browsing almost 50% of the time. Further, when men do buy something, almost 25% of them say that they don’t make any returns compared to none of the women we surveyed.

This last data point is really stunning, particularly given how big of a problem returns are for retailers. We’ve seen this play out within our own customer base - menswear brands have returns of 10-15% and don’t flag them as a big concern. For womenswear brands, returns are a huge concern and can be over 2x more frequent. Why are returns such a problem? This is a whole separate topic altogether, but the short answer is because most brands aren’t set up to process returns efficiently and it can take as long as three weeks to get an item back into circulation.

However, our survey also shows that there are some drawbacks to targeting men over women. Although men are more likely to make a purchase and less likely to return it, they also tend to shop less and according to our results, they also spend less than women (50% say they spend less than $100 when they shop compared to 35% of women). The data shows that most of the high value consumers (over $250 / order) are women.

Men's e-commerce needs to precisely target customers

We asked one of our pilot customers, Chip Malt at Rhone for his perspective on the results:

"We've seen great traction as a men's only direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand. Our main challenge is finding the target customer looking for our product. However, once we find him, he is a great customer and shops with us often. We also see very low return rates (75% below the industry average) as well as high repeat purchase rates (about 2-3x industry average), all resulting in a high customer lifetime value. We also find our male shoppers to be less adventurous than women, sticking mainly to core colors and styles, so seasonal and 'pop-colors' are mainly window dressing for us."

So what’s our conclusion? Well, we still think that menswear is underpenetrated from the direct to consumer brand side in relation to womenswear. That being said, as with everything in life, there are trade-offs. Brands that target men might have an easier time getting men to actually purchase and not return their orders, but the tradeoff is that men shop less frequently and spend less.